A 'Land Army' is not a long-term solution to the UK's farm labour problem

Faced with the prospect of vegetables rotting in the fields, environment secretary George Eustice called once again on 19 May for furloughed British workers to join a new ‘Land Army’ and ‘pick for Britain’. They will be dispatched to fields and orchards across Britain to do the work that would normally be done by the 60,000-80,000 seasonal workers who come each year from eastern Europe.

The day before, however, the government’s immigration bill received its second reading in the House of Commons. This bill gives the home secretary powers to introduce a new points-based immigration system. While the details have yet to be disclosed, the government has made clear that it will offer little access to low-wage workers such as farm labourers: its seasonal workers scheme will allow only 10,000 workers in this year.

These measures are contradictory. The situation which coronavirus has produced, with workers unable to travel from Romania and Bulgaria to work on UK farms, is not very different from the one the government’s new immigration system will produce in 2021. If a ‘Land Army’ is needed now, it will be needed then. But similar campaigns in the past have met with little success: although many people express interest, that interest tends to drop off rapidly when applicants find out about low wages and gruelling conditions.

If the labour supply is short then wages should go up – but that isn’t the case in agriculture

The Pick for Britain campaign attempts to appeal to workers’ patriotism. A more normal way to attract people to a job is to raise wages. Farm businesses have hitherto not done this. Access to low-cost European labour has allowed average wages in agriculture to remain among the lowest of any sector.

When they lose that access, however, farmers will have two choices: they can either pay more to attract British workers or they can mechanise. Both options would increase farmers’ production costs, which they would presumably try to recoup by putting up the price of their products. But if British farmers try to charge more for their home-grown asparagus and strawberries, then British supermarkets will tend to look abroad for supplies which have been produced using the cheaper labour available there. Rather than importing workers, we will simply import the fruits – and vegetables – of their labours.

Restricting trade would give British farmers the freedom to raise their prices

There is one way of avoiding this outcome: restricting trade in the same way as we propose to restrict migration through tariffs on the import of foreign fruit and vegetables. These tariffs would make imports more expensive, allowing British farmers to be competitive even while paying higher wages. The downside, of course, is that fruit and vegetables would cost more and the overall efficiency of the economy would suffer – hardly an appealing prospect as we recover from both the health and the economic impacts of coronavirus, and not at all in line with Brexiteers’ promises to cut the cost of food through lower tariffs.

The new UK Global Tariff, also announced on 19 May, does impose tariffs on food imports. But the government has said that it wants to sign a zero-tariff deal with the EU as well as new free trade agreements with countries such as the US. The number of countries eligible to export to the UK tariff-free is to go up, not down.

This combination of a liberal trade policy with a restrictive migration policy is unsustainable. Fruit and vegetables are one of the more profitable sectors of British farming, but the average farm still makes under £35,000 a year. Increased competition and a sharp rise in labour costs will drive many businesses under. This is nothing new: other low value-added industries such as textile manufacturing began leaving the UK for lower-wage economies elsewhere decades ago. Nor is it necessarily bad, at least in pure economic terms.

But the government’s ‘levelling-up’ agenda, which it was beginning to lay out before coronavirus struck, seemed to imply a desire for a different type of economic model from the one the UK has pursued over the last several decades, one that did not involve shedding agricultural and manufacturing jobs in small towns and rural areas in favour of highly-paid service industries in major cities. Rural and working-class constituencies that voted for Brexit in 2016 and Boris Johnson in 2019 want lower migration and more and better jobs: once it has resolved the immediate labour crisis, the government will need to work out how to give it to them.